Health Works

Health Works Take responsibility for your own health

Offering services such as - live blood analysis, nutritional counselling, neuro transmitter balancing, weight loss clinic, aura & chakra balancing. Stocking the best of both local and international products and with a fully trained staff completment who love to research and assist you - Healthworks is your first stop on the road to health and wellness

Health Works is open on Public Holidays from 10am to 3pm.
23/09/2026

Health Works is open on Public Holidays from 10am to 3pm.



23/09/2026

We Are Watching The 2nd Biggest Nutrition Experiment in Modern History

"I barely eat anymore"

When did that become a health testimonial? 🔥

Imagine spending years hating your reflection. Trying every diet. Blaming yourself. Dreading another appointment where the answer is lose weight.

Then something finally quiets the hunger.
- The scale moves.
- Your clothes loosen.
- People start congratulating you.

I understand why that feels like freedom, but you deserve more than applause for getting smaller.

You deserve someone asking whether you’re getting stronger. Whether you’re adequately nourished. Whether the way you’re losing weight supports the life you want to live.

Here is something we need to consider: What happens when we dramatically reduce food intake without fixing the nutritional quality of what people eat?

Smaller portions of a nutritionally poor diet don’t magically become good nutrition. Switching off hunger doesn’t switch off your need for nutrients.

GLP-1 medications can help people lose substantial weight. reduced food intake can also make it harder to meet protein, vitamin and mineral needs. A joint advisory from four major professional organizations specifically addresses these risks and the need to protect muscle during treatment.

Your appetite can go down. Your body’s responsibilities don’t. It still has tissue to repair, muscle to maintain, a nervous system to run and most importantly, a brain to nourish.

Take vitamin B12. It helps maintain the nervous system. Deficiency can cause neurological changes, including memory problems even without anemia. That’s established biology, not a prediction about weight-loss drugs.

Does that mean GLP-1s cause dementia? That leap is not supported, but we don’t need a dementia prediction to insist that nutrition matters TODAY.

The I’m never hungry statement tells me something about your appetite. It tells me nothing about whether you’re meeting your nutritional needs.

That distinction deserves a hell of a lot more attention.

Then there’s muscle.

Weight loss can include lean tissue as well as fat, and lean tissue measurements aren’t the same as measurements of muscle alone.

That’s why protecting strength and function matters as apposed to simply celebrating a lower number. The same joint advisory emphasizes resistance training alongside adequate protein; protein alone isn’t enough.

Think beyond the before-and-after photo. Think about carrying your groceries, getting off the floor, staying independent as you age.

The goal should be a body you can LIVE in not just one you can fit into smaller jeans.

I’ve spent almost two decades helping people improve their metabolic health and I want better questions than “How much have you lost?”

What are you eating?
Are you maintaining your strength?
How is your energy?
Who is checking whether your nutrition is keeping up with your weight loss?

If you’re using these medications, make the food you eat count.
- Prioritize high-quality protein.
- Build meals around nutrient-dense whole foods.
- Include fiber and enough fluids.
- Strength train at a level you can manage.
- Get support if nausea or appetite suppression makes adequate eating difficult.

Steak, eggs, fish and other nourishing foods can earn their place on that plate.

“I can survive on coffee and three bites” should prompt a conversation, not a standing ovation.

We’re very good at asking how quickly someone can shrink. I want us to care just as much about what they retain.
- Their strength.
- Their nourishment.
- Their quality of life.

Want a plan for living stronger, not just weighing less?

If your goal is to come off the medication with your prescriber’s guidance, or explore a natural approach to supporting appetite, blood sugar and metabolic health, let’s talk.

Comment GLP 👇 and I’ll send you the details of my protocol.

The goal is more than a smaller body. It’s the strength, energy and confidence to actually enjoy living in it.

P.S. for those of you wondering, the biggest nutrition experiment has been the food guidelines, and look how well that's worked out 🙃🙃

23/09/2026

Cocoa is one of the few foods with a genuinely interesting cardiovascular literature behind it, and most of what is sold has had the relevant compounds removed on purpose.

The compounds are flavanols, a subgroup of flavan-3-ols including epicatechin and the procyanidins built from it. They are what the cocoa research is about. They are also bitter, astringent, and reddish, which puts them in direct conflict with what a manufacturer wants from cocoa powder.

Alkalization solves that problem. Also called Dutch processing, it treats the cocoa with an alkaline solution, raising the pH from its natural 5.3 to 5.8 up to 7.6 or higher. The powder darkens, the harshness softens, and it disperses better in liquid. It is a cosmetic and sensory process. Nobody performs it for a nutritional reason.

The cost was quantified in a survey of commercial cocoa powders, and the relationship turned out to be linear. Untreated natural cocoa averaged 34.6 mg of total flavanols per gram. Lightly alkalized powder, at pH 6.5 to 7.2, averaged 13.8. Medium treatment brought it to 7.8. Heavily alkalized powder, the very dark kind, averaged 3.9 mg per gram. That is a loss of roughly 89 percent from natural, and even the gentlest commercial treatment removed about 60 percent.

Two things make this strange (in my opinion) rather than merely interesting.

The first is that darkness reads as quality. A deep, almost black cocoa looks stronger and more premium, and it is the tier with the least of the compound the marketing is implicitly referencing. The visual signal runs opposite to the chemistry.

The second is disclosure. In the United States, alkalized cocoa must be labelled, and it usually appears as "processed with alkali" or "Dutch process" in the ingredient list. That phrase is accurate and almost entirely uninformative to a shopper. It does not say what was processed out, and no front-of-pack claim is obliged to mention it.

This survey measured composition, not health outcomes, so it establishes what is present rather than what any given powder does in a person. And the work came from a chocolate manufacturer's own research centre, which is unusual in that the finding runs against the sponsor's commercial interest. That direction of bias makes it more credible, not less, though it remains an industry publication.

If cocoa is being eaten as a food, none of this matters much. If it is being eaten for the flavanols, the ingredient list decides whether that is happening at all, and the natural, lighter, more bitter powder is the one that still contains them.

Miller et al., J Agric Food Chem 2008. PMID 18710243

As women, we can spend so much time thinking about how our bodies look that we forget to appreciate what they actually d...
23/09/2026

As women, we can spend so much time thinking about how our bodies look that we forget to appreciate what they actually do.

- Your body gets you through long working days.
- It carries you through pregnancy and motherhood, for those who have experienced it.
- It allows you to hug your children.
- It gets you through school runs, grocery shopping, exercise, travel and everyday responsibilities.
- It heals.
- It adapts.
- It grows older with you.

It carries you through difficult seasons and celebrates the good ones.

And for women, our bodies move through remarkable changes throughout our lives, from puberty and menstruation to pregnancy, postpartum changes, perimenopause and menopause.

Our bodies are not static. They change because we change.

available at Health Works.


A daily dose of something powerful.Pomegranate is naturally rich in polyphenols and antioxidants, making it an easy addi...
22/09/2026

A daily dose of something powerful.
Pomegranate is naturally rich in polyphenols and antioxidants, making it an easy addition to your everyday wellness and active lifestyle routine.

Available at Health Works.



22/09/2026

Fermented foods lowered inflammation over 17 weeks. Adding more fiber did neither.

That's the finding from a Stanford randomized trial, and it should reframe how we think about feeding the gut.

Researchers assigned healthy adults to one of two microbiome-targeted diets, high-fiber or high-fermented-food, and ran deep immune and microbiome profiling across 17 weeks. The expectation going in was intuitive: fiber feeds your bacteria, so more of it should mean a healthier microbiome and lower inflammation.

That's not what happened.

The high-fiber group's inflammatory markers stayed flat. Its primary immune outcome, a composite cytokine response score, was unchanged from start to finish. And microbial diversity, one of the more reliable markers of gut resilience, held steady rather than rising.
The fermented-food group moved both. Inflammation declined steadily across the trial. Diversity climbed.

Fiber feeds bacteria the substrate they can digest. The study captured a signature of exactly this - i.e., the microbiome's glycan-degrading enzyme capacity rose while overall diversity stayed flat, consistent with the existing community upregulating rather than broadening

Fermented foods appear to do something structurally different. Live microbes plus the metabolic byproducts of fermentation seem to expand diversity directly, rather than by feeding what's already there. Greater diversity tracks with lower inflammatory load, and the fermented arm moved that lever while the fiber arm did not.
One detail worth sitting with: fiber wasn't inert for everyone. High-fiber consumers split into three distinct immune trajectories, and which one you landed in tracked your baseline microbiome diversity. Fiber's effect was contingent on the gut that received it. People starting with more diverse microbiomes likely respond differently than this average suggests.

Limitations:
Eighteen people per arm, healthy adults, 17 weeks. Inflammatory markers are intermediate biology, not clinical endpoints. Fiber's metabolic and cardiovascular benefits are established on separate, far larger evidence, and this trial doesn't touch them.

But for the specific job of moving the microbiome and inflammation, piling on more fiber wasn't the lever. The fermented foods, however, moved the needle.

Wastyk, Sonnenburg et al., Cell 2021.

"This is why mindful refeeding is one of the most important (and most overlooked) parts of fasting.When we've spent year...
21/09/2026

"This is why mindful refeeding is one of the most important (and most overlooked) parts of fasting.

When we've spent years swinging between comfort eating and restriction, ending a fast with intention can feel almost foreign.

We're so focused on how long we can go without food that we miss the incredible opportunity that happens when food comes back in: noticing what your body is asking for, choosing foods that help rebuild and restore, slowing down enough to experience true hunger and satisfaction, and reconnecting nourishment with care instead of guilt.

The power of fasting isn't simply found in the hours you don't eat; it's in the relationship with food, and yourself, that you create when you begin eating again 💙" - Dr Mindy Pelz



21/09/2026

Antioxidant defenses → liver-function support → healthy bile flow → easier digestive rhythm. That is the Milk Thistle progression that makes the most sense to me. The benefits connect around a clear liver-and-digestion theme instead of feeling random. I left what I’d personally choose in the comments.

GREEN is the word that you heard! Fabulous green powder options available for super nutritious supplementation.
16/09/2026

GREEN is the word that you heard!
Fabulous green powder options available for super nutritious supplementation.



A balanced gut starts with the right support 💚Rawbiotics GUT combines live liquid probiotics with carefully selected her...
15/09/2026

A balanced gut starts with the right support 💚

Rawbiotics GUT combines live liquid probiotics with carefully selected herbal extracts to support digestive comfort and a sensitive or compromised digestive system.

Thoughtful ingredients. Targeted gut support. A little more comfort in your everyday life.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“I have battled with Irritable Bowel Syndrome since childhood. This is the most amazing product I have ever used. I never want to be without it”- Reinette

Available at Health Works.




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